* Crossposted in area LORD, LORD2, LORD2_CHAT, LORD_SYSOP
Hello All!

From a email to gameport and then from Michael Preislar.

=== Cut ===
Hi Shannon, Gert,

Interbbs IGMs for Lord (and IGMS or addons for other games) allow players from one BBS to compete with players from other BBS's. Lord had LordNet and InterLord. Both were 3rd party programs accessible from Lord's "Other Places" menu.

There aren't any interbbs addons for Lord2.

If anyone wants to take a stab at creating one, then no troubles. The documentation for the REF language that Lord2 uses is included with Lord2.

However, trouble that they may run into..

1) With Lord2 being a somewhat graphical game (granted, ansi, but still graphical.. Not text menus), people have always expected to be able to see all other players roaming around - not just the other players online from this bbs,
but anyone hooked in via interbbs. I'm not sure if that'd be possible since Lord2's in-memory version of the map.dat would need to be constantly updated, therefore, Lord2 and whatever 3rd party program would need to be able to share that memory space. Not sure if that part is possible.

2) And if that part could be worked out, there'd be issues of cpu usage. Lord2 has always been a rather system intensive game. More data updates (whether in memory or on disk) from an interactive interbbs addon would only make it worse.

Unless they went with a passive form that only showed interbbs network top scores and the like. That should be pretty easily to implement.

There'd also be concerns about how data would be transfered from one bbs to any
others. With the old InterBBS leagues, the sysops would have a setup that could
be used for echomail transfers.. Namely, a front end mailer (like InterMail, FrontDoor, etc) and a nodelist.
Those softwares (or suitable replacements) could potentially still be used.. But people have gotten very used to the internet making things "instant", and echomail transfers just don't do that.

So, an interbbs addon would probably need a client/server software pair to make
things "instant".. This really pushes the interbbs project into something a little larger than a Lord2 addon.

All combined, it'd be a cool thing. The client/server software could potentially be used for Lord2 as well as other games at the same time (maybe a new Lord igm, a ROK igm, maybe Usurper since its now open source, etc etc)..

But to play devil's advocate..

1) Would there really be that much interest? How many players are there today? Enough interest and players to warrant all of this? From my own standpoint, I get few emails about Lord, Lord2, or Teos.. And there are even fewer registrations.

2) Someone, somewhere, will ask this, so let me do so and get it out of the way: Doesn't telnet kind of alleviate the need for interbbs?
Interbbs had a definite purpose when people were limited to what boards they could get on. With telnet, those limitations don't exist..
Therefore, people could potentially all play from the same bbs..

Altogether.. If anyone wants to attempt an interbbs addon / module / igm / etc for Lord2.. Please do! I think it'd be really cool to see what people could come up with. Just make sure you're doing it for your own enjoyment, because I don't think the popularity of yesteryear is attainable anymore.

--
Michael Preslar



=== Cut ===
Take care
Gert Andersen



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